


ghosts at the gazebo

by Anonymous



Category: Pokemon GO
Genre: real world racism?, sorry about that
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-11
Updated: 2019-07-11
Packaged: 2020-05-19 21:15:54
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 580
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19364230
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: sometimes i think about pokémon habitats





	ghosts at the gazebo

**Author's Note:**

> the whole premise of pokemon go is pokemon in our world, so i guess i decided to kinda-sorta work through that here in a kinda-sorta way ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

Sometimes I find myself thinking about Pokémon habitats. Okay. Not only sometimes. My thoughts travel to this topic whenever I’m on a run. I run in a park—it’s one of the few green spaces in the city—a couple miles away from my apartment. Thank goodness I live in the south part because the hiking trails and meadows and springs and shit are all on this side of the river. 

But anyway: Pokémon habitats and the park. Y’see the park is pretty normal. The trail is covered in sand and red-pebble gravel. Trees stretch northwards to the lake. Growlithe poop that the owners pretend they can’t pick up and put in any of the nearby trashcans litters the edges of everything. I always do a pretty good job of dodging that. Through the thicket of brush along the trail I can usually see Pokémon like Seviper or Rattata minding their business. Hanging from the trees, Aipom usually try to steal my hat. I’ve taken to keeping it on with bobby pins. Sometimes a Starly might rush past me chasing a Weedle. But there’s this one spot along my usual 7-mile route. It’s this little gazebo looking out to the river—lake? I seriously don’t know. The map says it’s both—on a hill. For some reason a lot of ghost Pokémon tend to gather there. 

I didn’t think much of it before daylight savings time when I was still technically running right before sunrise, but now watching the spectral forms of Gastly and Misdreavus float around the gazebo gives me pause. They cluster mostly around the gazebo on the side closest to the water. A couple Duskull hover right above the water staring vacantly into the nothing beneath. 

It’s ten AM now. I finished my run hours ago and I’m just sitting in the grass watching them from a distance. They pay me no mind. Perhaps I shouldn’t have elected to sit cris-cross applesauce. The sweat drying on my everything has me that itchy and uncomfortable sticky. I could go home and shower finally, but I need to know when the ghost Pokémon leave. Normally, they’re nocturnal, so what’s so special about here that has them out at this time of day?

A Magikarp beaches itself onto the grass near me. It only flops around wheezing for a second before I toss it back into the water. A few minutes later a Barboach does the same. Then a Finneon. And another couple Magikarp. This is a pretty isolated spot. I wonder if it would have died if I hadn’t been here.  
Finally, the stickiness and stench of my sweat is too much for me and I get up to leave. It’s 11:23. I’m halfway back to my apartment before I think about my hometown. Back in the 20s all the black people got run out of town. They said if you let the sun go down on you after then, you’d find yourself either strung up or feeding the gators at the bottom of one of the many lakes around town. My big sister used to tell me the big lake next to our school was haunted. I think about the Duskull staring down into the murky waters. 

That’s the thing about the American south, I think. I’m a thousand miles away, but nothing changes really. This is a big city, but perhaps it has the same secrets below the shore as my rinky dink hometown back east.


End file.
